Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Peculiarly enough, a hypothetical third party for independents would look like Progressives on steroids

I do love the way my liberal Facebook friends make me aware of things I wouldn’t otherwise notice. One of those things is a Matt Miller op-ed in the Washington Post, which imagines the perfect speech a dream independent candidate would give. As Miller describes it:

This is one columnist’s stab at what a candidate might sound like if he or she were trying to appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate who feel both parties are failing us.

This dream speech, the one Miller imagines appealing to “the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate,” goes on for five looonnnggg screens. I stopped reading halfway through the second paragraph. Why? Because of the sentence I highlighted:

I’m running for president as an independent because we need to change the debate if we’re going to change the country. Neither of our two major parties has a strategy for solving our biggest problems; they have strategies for winning elections, which isn’t the same thing. Democrats and Republicans will tell you, as I do, that they want to make America competitive again, keep faith with our deepest values of fairness and opportunity, and fix our broken political system. But the Democrats’ timid half-measures and the Republicans’ mindless anti-government creed can’t begin to get us there.

If you’ll allow me to translate that emphasized sentence, Miller is saying that the solution to our nation’s problems is to ignore anything the Republicans say and, instead, go full throttle on the Progressive agenda. That is the only way to understand his statement that the Democrats are too timid to implement full measures, while everything that the Republicans propose is mindlessly stupid. Presumably, he then goes on for several more screens to explain precisely how he’d implement this hyper-Progressive agenda.

In what logical universe does Miller exist that makes him think that moving to the left of Left will “appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate”? You can see why I stopped reading right about there. Anyone who cannot recognize his own ideological blindness probably will not think or write well enough to justify the time I would have to spend reading his article.

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Funny how Miller thinks that the way to “appeal to the majority of voters in the middle of the electorate” is to move to the far left. Only in the dishonest mind of a hack like Miller would the far left be identical with the middle.

Mike Devx

I agree Miller is a hack, but is he dishonest? Or just stuck with his ideological blinders firmly on? Just like Elizabeth Warren… they may not be dishonest, actually.

What ideological blinders seem to lead to, to me, is an extreme parochialism. These people hide within insular communities, isolated from alternative viewpoints, and they march in lock-step to groupthink. We recognize that their belief system is horrendous, leads to misery for all, and could actually be described as evil.

There was an article recently where one of the far-leftists, I think it was a columnist, was sent by his leftie editors out into “middle America” to talk directly with “the people”. The resulting article focused on the people he talked to in Texarkana (A city, or two cities, straddling the border on I-30 between Texas and Arkansas). He came away shocked out of his insularity, understood most of what they were talking and complaining about, understood the nature of Tea Party protests, although he ended up not buying into it, but he understood the viewpoint, at least. I don’t think he’ll be reflexively calling them “racists!” anymore, but we’ll see.

http://bookwormroom.com Bookworm

David Mamet’s rabbi told him that you can only argue with someone if you understand their position. He went hunting around to understand conservatives, and came away agreeing with them.

I do wonder if this “I get both sides” helps explain why neocons are such a powerful presence in the blog/book world. We do get both sides, having lived on one side and then embracing the other.

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